But young people see dense cities with rail transit as cool, desirable, and fun and the suburbs as stifling and conformist, which is the polar opposite of older generations who feared cities and viewed them as dangerous and subways and light rail as second rate transit.

It's a dimension of liturgy and of Christian identity that I think has been brought out more clearly than ever in the last few years by some rather maverick kinds of biblical scholarship -- 'maverick', because many of the assumptions of biblical scholarship in the last couple of generations have been based on the idea that essentially the Jewish world of Jesus 'day was non-conformist, that is, that it approached liturgy very much at the level of ideas and inspiration.

In conclusion, then, it is perhaps worth recalling the words of Lt.Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the self-confessed "conformist" and prosecutor in seven cases before the Military Commissions (including that of Binyam Mohamed), who quit his job on September 24, complaining that potentially exculpatory evidence was not provided to the defense lawyers, and that the Commissions system was "not served by having someone who may be innocent be convicted of the crime."

It is a "conformist" stage in the sense that it is acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others and as yet does not have a sure enough grasp on its own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective.